


Providence

by SouthSideStory



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 18:42:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5637802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s dreamed about finding the girl with a sun marked on her right palm since he was old enough to understand what soulscars were. For a boy whose mother was loneliness, the idea of a soulmate—a person meant to love him, to be his family—was impossible for Naruto to ignore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Sasuke likes to examine the mark in the middle of his left palm: a crescent, rich red, like a blood moon. His parents say he was born with it, which means his mate is older than him. He wonders whether the gap is only a span of a few weeks or months, or if the girl he’s meant for is already grown. Soulscars don’t care about age differences, or gender, or nationality.

Most people have a single mark, but every once in awhile a person will develop two, more, or none. Itachi still doesn’t have one, and half the clan has taken to betting on whether a soulscar will ever appear on him at all.

Sasuke’s is completely normal, utterly average. It’s on his hand, a common place for someone’s mark to appear, and the color is typical too. He doesn’t have anything unusual, not like his cousin Saiyuri, whose feather-shaped scar is white, the rarest shade of all. Even so, there’s only one other mark in the world that’s precisely like his, and it belongs to the girl he’s meant to be with forever.

Sometimes he’s curious about his mate, but for the most part Sasuke is jealous of his brother, who has no scar, no destiny laid out for him. He has the freedom to choose.

* * *

Sakura’s soulscar appeared when she was four months old, on July twenty-third, sometime in the early hours of the morning. That must have been the moment when her soulmate was born, when he first drew breath. So every year, on that date, Sakura thinks of her mystery boy and wishes him a happy birthday.

She starts at the Academy the spring she turns seven years old. The first thing she and her classmates do during their recess is compare soulscars—all but a handsome boy named Sasuke who stands off to the side, arms stubbornly crossed over his chest. A bold, blonde girl marches right up to him and asks to see his mark anyway.

Sasuke frowns at her, says, “No,” and walks back inside of the Academy.

Shikamaru holds up his right arm, so that she can see the blue figure-eight just above his elbow and asks, “Where’s yours?”

“Here,” Sakura says, and she opens her hand for him to see the soulscar imprinted on the middle of her palm.

Shikamaru just nods, then runs off to see if Hinata’s mark matches his own.

It doesn’t, though, because to everybody’s surprise, the Hyuuga girl’s soulmate is Uzumaki Naruto.

* * *

He’s dreamed about finding the girl with a sun marked on her right palm since he was old enough to understand what soulscars were. For a boy whose mother was loneliness, the idea of a soulmate—a person meant to love him, to be his _family_ —was impossible for Naruto to ignore.

Now he’s found her, and it doesn’t matter, because the Hyuuga Clan is notorious for disregarding soulscars and marrying only other men and women with their dojutsu. They prioritize keeping their bloodline pure and their kekkei genkai intact over such trivial things as love and fate.

Besides, even if Hyuuga Hiashi would have allowed his eldest child to marry outside of their clan, he would never make such an exception for Naruto. The whole village despises him, and he can only think, after Hiashi-san tells him to stay away from his daughter, that he’s simply not meant to be loved.

* * *

“You will not even speak to that boy,” her father orders. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, Otousan,” Hinata says, obedient as always. Not that he cares how closely she follows the rules; she’ll always be a disappointment.

Not like her little sister. Two-year-old Hanabi has already learned to activate her fledgling byakugan, a skill that Hinata didn’t acquire until last year. Otousan brags that, with such a powerful dojutsu already, she’ll undoubtedly become a prodigy of their clan.

Hinata can’t help but notice that her parents’ soulscars do not match. Her mother’s is an inky oval on the inside of her right wrist, while Otousan’s mark stretches across his left shoulder in the shape of a pale snake, almost the same shade as his skin.

She doesn’t know until that spring that the color of Okaasan’s soulscar is significant. That it was once a vibrant green, but when she was fifteen the mark on her wrist turned black. This, Hinata learns, only happens when your soulmate dies.

* * *

Sasuke is easily the most skilled ninja-in-training at the Academy, and this draws the attention of his instructors and classmates alike. The boys are jealous of him and the girls follow him around, stealing covert looks when they think he isn’t paying attention, trying to figure out what his soulscar is. No one’s going to see it, though, because Sasuke wears fingerless gloves every day, so that his mark is always kept covered.

He’s been at the Academy for a week when Iruka-sensei asks a difficult math question that stumps the class. Only Sakura raises her hand, and it’s then that Sasuke sees the mark on her left palm: a crimson crescent moon identical to his own.

_That can’t be right_. He can hardly think of anyone less like himself than Haruno Sakura, the shy, insecure girl who gets picked on by their classmates.

Except something about it makes a strange sort of sense. The first day he saw her he felt an odd pull in her direction, an interest in her that he couldn’t quite explain.

Sasuke keeps this to himself. He’ll tell her eventually, he decides. Just not yet, because he isn’t ready to belong to someone else.  

* * *

Sakura studies her soulscar by the starlight streaming in through her window. It’s late, and she’s supposed to be asleep, but she can’t stop looking at the mark on her hand. It’s such a small, simple thing to carry so much meaning, her fate branded into her skin. She thinks about who her soulmate could be, where he lives, when (or if) she’ll find him. Not everyone has the opportunity to meet their partner, after all. Sakura knows who she _wants_ her mate to be, but chances are that Sasuke will never have any reason to notice her.

The next day, when she goes to school, Sasuke’s seat is empty. Once everyone else is there, Iruka-sensei tells the class to settle down, then says, “You won’t be seeing Sasuke for a few days, but when he comes back I want everyone to give him some space.”

“Why’s Sasuke-kun gone?” asks Ino, pouting.

Iruka-sensei runs a weary hand over his face and says, “There was an incident with the Uchiha Clan. There’s not much I can tell you, other than it has been a very sad night, for the village, and especially for Sasuke. He’s going to need a lot of time to recover.”

When Sakura goes home, her mother and father sit her down and ask her what she heard about Sasuke in school today.

“Iruka-sensei said something bad happened with Sasuke-kun’s family. Should I bring him flowers?” she asks. “That might make him feel better.”

Her parents share the sort of knowing, serious look that tells her something is very wrong. “I don’t think flowers are going to help Sasuke much right now, Sakura,” Otousan says softly. “He lost his whole clan last night.”

Sakura frowns and asks, “Lost?”

Okaasan sighs. “Sakura, you know how you lost Spotty last year? Do you remember what I told you about that?”

She nods. When her puppy went to sleep and didn’t wake up, she asked her mother what it meant to be dead, and Okaasan had said, voice gentle, “It means you’re gone, and there’s no way to come back.”

Sakura is not quite eight, and it takes a moment for her to understand what her parents are telling her. Then she gasps, covers her mouth, and feels tears coming to her eyes.

“Sasuke-kun’s whole family is gone?” she asks.

Okaasan takes her in her arms and rubs circles on her back, just like she always does when Sakura is upset or sick. “Yes,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

That night, Sakura lies awake in bed, thinking of Sasuke. It seems so wrong that he’s all alone in the world. She wonders where he’ll live and who will take care of him now that he has no parents or brother.

Sasuke’s desk remains empty for the rest of the week, but he returns to the Academy on Monday. He’s dressed as he usually is, in a dark, short-sleeved shirt with the Uchiha crest emblazoned on the back, fingerless gloves on his hands. But there’s an emptiness in his eyes that wasn’t there before, a coldness in his rare speech and stiff posture that’s nothing like the Sasuke of only five days ago.

Iruka-sensei told the class not to give Sasuke their condolences or acknowledge what happened to his family in any way, so Sakura doesn’t say what she wants to, which is that she’s sorry this happened to him and she hopes he’s going to be okay.

* * *

Publicly, Otousan says that what happened to the Uchiha Clan is a great tragedy, but privately, he tells Hinata it’s no less than their arrogant cousin-clan deserved.

_That’s awful_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say.

Sometimes, when no one’s looking, Hinata will trace the golden sun on her palm, thinking about Naruto. He’s a brave, brash boy who never gives up, regardless of how many times he fails, and she can’t help but quietly admire him. He’s rude and reckless, an orphan boy who’s lived without rules for so long that he doesn’t know how to respect anybody, but these things don’t matter to Hinata. She finds him beautiful, from his messy blonde hair and sky blue eyes to the strange marks on his cheeks.

She doesn’t dare say this to her cousins because all of them are loyal to Otousan before anyone else. Hinata doesn’t blame them for this, though; the Branch House has been bred and conditioned to obey her father.

When Okaasan misses dinner, Hinata goes looking for her. She isn’t in her garden or her bedroom (separate from Otousan’s ever since Hanabi was born), the reading room or the kitchen. She would use her byakugan to see through the walls, but there is an unspoken rule in their household never to violate one another’s privacy in this way.

Then she opens her mother’s bathroom door, and the sight on the other side is one Hinata will never forget.

Okaasan lies in a tub of red water, her long, lustrous hair pinned up on top of her head. She could be sleeping, except her chest doesn’t rise and fall with the cadence of breathing, and her face is stiff and colorless. Hinata touches her mother’s cheek and finds her skin cold. Vaguely, in some distant way, she notes that Okaasan’s wrists have been slit (cutting right through her black soulscar), and a bloody razor is still gripped in her right hand.

She doesn’t wail, and she doesn’t cry. Instead, Hinata kisses her mother’s bare forehead, on the seal that marked her as Branch House, and walks downstairs to tell her father that Okaasan is dead.

* * *

Naruto’s Academy years are lonely and long. He convinces Iruka-sensei to let him take the graduation test early, hoping to become a genin and get out of the school that he hates, but he fails the exam not once, but twice. After that he decides to wait until everyone is tested and try his luck then.

His days are full of learning jutsu he has trouble mastering and grammar, history, and mathematics that are too boring to bother with. He has a hard time sitting still and paying attention, and besides, what use is book-learning to a ninja? At night, he goes home to his empty apartment, microwaves a cup of ramen for dinner, struggles through his homework, plays a board game by himself, and goes to sleep.

Every now and then he studies the mark on his right palm and thinks of the girl he’s supposed to love but will never know. Hinata is pretty in a subtle, gentle way. Kind, quiet, and thoughtful. Something about being in her presence makes him feel just a little less alone, but it’s rare for them to have a moment together.

The spring he’s twelve years old, Naruto fails the graduation exam for the third time, discovers what he is—a jinchuriki, a vessel for a nine-tailed monster—and is assigned to Team 7. He doesn’t much like his squadmates at first. Sakura gets easily frustrated with him and always hits him upside the head, and Sasuke is a bastard who’s so good at everything that Naruto can’t stand him.

But things change after the Wave Country. Sasuke almost dies saving Naruto’s life, and he truly feels the chakra of the Kyubi overtake him. There’s a bond forged between the three of them and Kakashi-sensei now, something immutable that neither time nor distance can ever break.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Sasuke never looks at his soulscar anymore, and he rarely thinks on it. There’s no need, not when he’s dedicated himself to vengeance. Love is a weakness he cannot afford to indulge in, a distraction that might tempt him to take a different path.

Because it _is_ tempting, sometimes. When Sakura smiles in the soft way that is specifically reserved for him, gets close enough that he can smell the vanilla shampoo on her shell pink hair, or simply hooks her arm through his. Save for her unsubtle attention, it has been four years since anyone touched Sasuke with affection. The only contact he has these days is during combat. He may be a ninja, but even Sasuke grows tired of only ever being touched in violence. So when Sakura is bold enough to take his hand, his stomach flips and his heart races at the sensation of skin against skin. In those moments, he’s reminded that there’s a mark on her left palm that’s a twin to his own, a brand that means she’s his match.

It would be easy, he thinks, to fall in love with Sakura. She’s bright and warm, kind and beautiful, the sort of girl any intelligent boy would consider a catch. She isn’t perfect, of course—sometimes she’s snobby, ungrateful, temperamental—but considering his own flaws, Sasuke doesn’t think he has much right to judge Sakura for hers.

Yes, it would be easy to love her, and this is exactly why he needs to push away those feelings before they can take root and convince him to abandon his purpose. To try to live something like a normal life.

So today (after they’ve picked up their payment for their last mission), when she looks in his direction, blushing, Sasuke forces himself to ignore her. He pretends that he doesn’t see the endearing flush on her cheeks.

“Let’s get something to eat!” Naruto says. “I’m starving.”

“No way,” he says. “I’ve had all that I can stand of you today.” This might be half a lie, but there’s enough truth in it for Sasuke not to care.

Naruto glares at him. “Like I give a shit.”

“Idiot,” Sasuke says, casually and calmly as breathing.

“Bastard,” Naruto hisses.

Sakura rolls her eyes, probably too used to the inevitability of their fights to bother interfering.

After a few more insults about his teammate’s intelligence (or lack thereof), Naruto cusses him colorfully, gives him the finger, and stalks off.

“You guys don’t have to be so nasty to each other all the time,” Sakura says.

She follows him down Main Street, staying close enough that their shoulders brush with every few steps. He’d expected her to go away when Naruto did, but that was a stupid assumption, because Sakura can stick like a bur when she wants to. (This should probably bother him more than it does.)

“Where are you headed?” he asks.

“Nowhere,” Sakura says, and her blush spreads from her cheeks to her neck. “I just thought I’d walk with you, if you don’t mind.”

There are a half-dozen things he could tell Sakura that would get rid of her, no doubt, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to say any of them. Being mean to Naruto is second nature, but that’s because he knows none of their arguments ever really hurts the idiot. Sakura is different. She cares what he thinks, and whenever he loses his temper and speaks harshly to her, he regrets it.

He lets her follow him all the way to his apartment. She hesitates at his door and asks, “Um, can I come in?”

Sasuke shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter one way or another, and holds the door open for her.

The assignment they just returned from was a long escort mission all the way to the northern border of the Fire Country, and they were gone for a week, so his apartment is a little dustier than he would like. Otherwise, it’s perfectly neat. Spartan even. Habit takes over, and he takes off his shoes and gloves.

Sakura looks around his living room, smiling, and says, “I’m pretty organized, but not like this. You could perform surgery in here, Sasuke-kun.”

He can’t tell whether she’s impressed or making fun of him. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

“Do you want something to drink?” It’s a question that his mother always asked of guests, and it comes to his lips automatically.

“Water would be nice,” Sakura says.

He pours her a cup from the pitcher of filtered water he keeps in his fridge and gives it to her.

She drops the glass. It shatters on his perfectly polished hardwood floor and water spills everywhere. He frowns and starts to ask what’s wrong, because it isn’t like Sakura to be clumsy, when he notices that she’s staring at his hand. His bare, left hand, where a soulscar just like hers is perfectly visible.

* * *

Sakura came to the realization just yesterday that she no longer cares who her soulmate is, because she loves Sasuke, and she’d rather have him than whoever the fates slated her to be with.

Now she’s looking at a mark identical to her own, a crescent moon, imprinted on Sasuke’s left palm, and Sakura can barely breathe. For a moment, she feels nothing but a pure, wild happiness, unthinking and uncomplicated.

_He’s my soulmate._

Sasuke closes his hand into a tight fist, as if hiding the scar will make her forget what she’s seen.

“You’re my match,” Sakura says, breathless. She walks around the broken glass on the floor, puts her hand on his arm, and looks up at him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sasuke says coolly.

“ _What?_ ” Sakura asks. “Of course it matters! Why would you say that?”

He takes a step backward, breaking the contact between them. “Do you know what happened to my clan?” he asks.

She wants to soften her words, but there’s no gentle way to answer this, so she says, quietly, “Someone killed them.”

“Not _someone_ ,” Sasuke says, and now she hears a powerful force in his voice. A fury that far eclipses typical anger, a hatred as deep as the sea. “I know who did it, and I’m going to kill him.”

She can understand his rage, of course, and his loathing too—but this shinobi, whoever he is, had the skill to murder every man, woman, and child of Konoha’s strongest clan, save Sasuke. As much as she has faith in his abilities, Sakura can’t help but wonder whether Sasuke even means to survive this fight.

“If I’m going to avenge my clan, I can’t waste time on unimportant things,” he says.

Sakura recoils. “I’m unimportant to you?” she asks, voice small.

Sasuke sighs, clearly frustrated, and says, “I didn’t mean it like that, Sakura.”

Anger overcomes her hurt feelings, and she says, “You should have told me. Even if you don’t want me for a partner, I deserve to know who my mate is, and you know it.”

He says nothing, perhaps because she’s hit on the truth.

Sakura leaves, hurries out of his apartment and onto the Konoha streets, doing her best to hold back tears. If she’d stayed in that room one moment longer she would have cried, and she doesn’t want to cry over this. Over him.

Fate has played some cruel trick on Sakura, pairing her with Sasuke, promising that they’re destined to love one another, only for him to reject her anyway.

The next few weeks are difficult and slow. Sakura tries to behave normally, but she can’t bring herself to act the same around Sasuke. When he turns thirteen she wishes him a happy birthday, but she doesn’t get him a gift, as she’d originally planned. She stops flirting, and as much as she wants to feel the warmth of his skin, Sakura makes sure they never touch outside of sparring.

Team 7 spends most of the summer carrying out ridiculous, low-paying D-rank missions that seem trivial next to their experience in the Wave Country. Naruto constantly demands more challenging assignments, and for once, he and Sasuke are in agreement about something. Sakura keeps out of it, keeps her head low.

Then, as August winds down, Kakashi-sensei signs their team up for the chunin exams. Sakura passes the written test easily, and on the first day of September, all nine of the rookies show up at the Forty-Fourth Training Ground for the second exam.

The Forest of Death turns out to be a nightmare. She’s scared and alone, and Sakura has never felt weaker than when that kunoichi from Sound grabs her by her long hair and berates her. She pulls her kunai and cuts her way out of her enemy’s grasp. Pink strands scatter to the wind, but Sakura doesn’t care, because she’s free.

This only lasts a little while, though. Zaku overcomes her, but still, she’s not going to give up. She won’t let him hurt her boys, even if he beats her senseless. Sakura takes blow after blow to the face, and each one makes her world spin, until finally he knocks her off of him.

When Sasuke wakes, she turns toward him, happy to see him standing on his own two feet. But that joy is short-lived, because an unusual chakra swirls around him, and she can feel the darkness of it, ominous and powerful, not at all like the Sasuke she knows. Slowly, he straightens, steps forward, and strange marks burn their way along the left side of his body, like some quick spreading disease. This is not the boy she loves; this is some monster wearing his skin, and nothing in her life has ever scared her half this much.

“Sakura, who did this to you?” he asks, and even his voice is wrong, laced with some malice she’s never heard there before. “Who was it?”

Sakura doesn’t dare answer, because she knows that if Sasuke gets his hands on Zaku he’ll tear him apart.

She’s right about that. The fight is short, and in the end, Sasuke taunts Zaku, makes him beg for mercy before he breaks his bones—effortless violence, remorseless, as vindictive as it is vicious. And the worst part is that he _smiles_ while he does it.

Sasuke casts Zaku aside, limp as a puppet with its string cut, and turns to the only remaining Sound ninja, that awful smile still playing about his handsome mouth.

_Whoever that is, it’s not Sasuke._

Sakura’s weeping, terrified as much _for_ Sasuke as _of_ him, and she sprints forward and wraps him in her arms. Holds him close, her body pressed against his back, and pleas with him to stop. He’s burning up, like he’s sick with some hideous fever, and when he looks at her over his shoulder, she sees nothing familiar in those red eyes.

In a heartbeat, something changes: the sharingan crimson fades back to the beautiful black she’s come to love, and the marks on his body recede, then disappear entirely.

* * *

Hinata recuperates at home after the chunin exams. Otousan seems torn between disappointment and worry over her condition, while Neji hovers in her periphery, his expression weighted with guilt. He nearly killed her over the sins of their fathers, and perhaps she ought to hate him for this, but Hinata can’t find it in herself to be upset with Neji. She understands his resentment, his fury; he’s a bird who was never meant to be caged.

She rarely indulges in thoughts of her mother. For the most part, Hinata carries on as if Okaasan is simply gone, had never existed. This is easier than remembering the sweet smell of her lilac perfume, the soft timbre of her rare laugh. How she looked while pregnant, belly rounded with her second child. (How she looked dead, in a bathtub full of scarlet water.)

Sometimes Hinata dreams that she’s floating on her back in the Naka River, only the water is red with blood, _her_ blood. Those are the nights when she wakes sweating and terrified, and she has to turn on a lamp and hold out her arms underneath the yellow light to assure herself that she isn’t bleeding from slit wrists.

Other times, she dreams that the seal which marks members of the Branch House is branded onto her forehead, and Hanabi is promoted to Head of Hyuuga over her. This is less a senseless nightmare than it is a prediction, she thinks. Her father’s disappointment in her seems to deepen every day, while his pride in her little sister only grows. He wishes that Hinata had been the secondborn. She can see it in his face.

On the first day that she finally feels well enough to go out on her own, Hinata takes a walk by the Naka River. (Its water is decidedly muddy brown, not red.) The day couldn’t be more beautiful, sunny and bright, with fluffy white clouds drifting across the great expanse of blue sky.

She finds Naruto sitting on the bank, shoes off, orange pants rolled up to just below his knees, his feet in the water. He looks at her, smiles, and waves. It would be rude not to at least wave back, she decides, but somehow Hinata ends up sitting next to this boy she’s been forbidden to speak to.

“Won’t you get in trouble for this?” Naruto asks.

“Not if Otousan doesn’t know,” she says softly. It feels treacherous to even say, and she’s suddenly anxious that her father will appear out of nowhere and drag her home.

Naruto grins, wide and bright, and says, “I didn’t know you had some rebel in you, Hinata-chan.”

From him that’s something like a compliment, and she feels herself blushing, a hot flush that covers her whole face and neck. _I must look like a tomato_ , Hinata thinks, and that only makes her more embarrassed.  

“You’re really red,” Naruto says, in that frank, almost-rude way he has. “Are you okay?”

“I’m f-fine,” Hinata says, and she wants to slap herself for stuttering in this moment of all moments, when she and Naruto finally have some privacy.

He holds up his right hand, so that she can see the golden sun imprinted there, and says, “So, we’re soulmates.”

Naruto really isn’t the sort to mince words. He says what he thinks without reservation (and sometimes without thought), a quality that she can’t possibly imagine possessing. From a young age she was always taught not to speak unless spoken to, and when allowed to express herself, to choose her words carefully.

Hinata nods, and she can’t help but smile a little. “We are.”

They discuss missions and the chunin exams, their teams and senseis. Naruto does most of the talking, but he always stops and invites Hinata to speak, asks her questions and encourages her to say more, if she wants, but they do not talk about the family he doesn’t have or the clan she’s bound to. Their conversation lasts for so long that the bright day fades to a pink and purple sunset, and Naruto says, “You should probably get home before somebody comes looking for you.”

“Yeah,” Hinata says. “I should.”

She stays a moment longer anyway, makes no move to leave, and Naruto takes her hand in his. His fingers and palms are rough with callouses, and Hinata can feel the power that lurks beneath his gentle grip. _That’s Naruto through and through_ , she thinks. Strength concealed by kindness.

* * *

After the day they spent together by the Naka River, Naruto and Hinata start to see each other. They meet in secluded meadows, unpopular restaurants, and his own apartment. Just to talk, hold hands, and enjoy each other’s company.

He can see it now, how Hinata is the girl he’s fated to love. She calms, comforts, and supports him, and with each day they spend together, he finds something new about her that he appreciates. Naruto used to think her dojutsu was strange-looking, and he always felt the need to look away from any Hyuuga’s blank-eyed stare, but now he sees the unique beauty of the byakugan. He likes the soft luster of her dark hair, finds her occasional stutter endearing, and gets an odd satisfaction out of making her blush.

Naruto has never had anyone to teach him how to cook, and most of Hinata’s meals have been prepared for her by servants, so neither of them knows their way around a kitchen. Still, today at his apartment they experiment with making miso soup together. Their first pot turns out horribly, because they forgot to add the dashi, but their second is pleasantly edible. They sit at his beat-up kitchen table and eat their soup.

“This is actually pretty good,” Naruto says, as he finishes his bowl of miso. “Maybe our kids wouldn’t starve after all.”

Hinata looks at him with wide eyes and says, “You’ve thought about—about having kids with me?”

He shrugs, because really, he doesn’t see what the big deal is. “Yeah. I mean we’re supposed to love each other someday, right? Making a family just makes sense. To me anyway,” he says, suddenly a little nervous that Hinata might not feel the same way.

She smiles softly and says, “It makes sense to me too.”

Relieved, Naruto grins, wide and bright, and says, “Not that we gotta worry about that for ten or fifteen years anyway.”

Hinata’s gentle smile fades, and she says, “I suppose.”

_I’m stupid_ , Naruto thinks, because children are something they’re never going to have to worry about at all, unless she disobeys her father and abandons her clan. And he can’t ask her to do that; Naruto realizes the value of family too much to ever encourage Hinata to leave hers behind.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the soulmates AU I’ve been working on. I read a glorious Zutara oneshot called “oracle bones” by sohhng (which I highly recommend) and I was inspired to write this story. I expect that Providence is going to be a short-ish multi-chap, maybe 20k words before all is said and done. But that’s just my best guess. 
> 
> Many thanks to DeepPoeticGirl for pre-reading this and brainstorming with me!


End file.
